Archive

Ash Walsh has endured a difficult weekend in his maiden race meeting at the famous Spa Francorchamps circuit in Belgium.

Walsh, from Ipswich in Queensland and driving with the support of the Australian Motorsport Foundation, finished 17th and 18th in the two West European Cup races, held in typically variable and soaking wet Spa conditions.

The weekend also saw Walsh have his first “big” crash in European motorsport, when he lost control of his Formula Renault car in top gear in wet conditions. He emerged from the crash with no problems.

Qualifying was where Walsh’s problems first started, with all of the Hitech Junior cars struggling for pace in both sessions. The first session was held in half wet, half dry conditions, while the second session was completely wet.

The racing was also the same. Race 1 was dry, where Walsh took 17th, before an extremely wet Race 2. Walsh actually reported that he thought the race was going to be called off, due to the heavy downpour that hit the circuit. On a number of occasions, Walsh could not see anything, but he drove sensibly to bring the car home in one piece. Other drivers weren’t so fortunate, with one of his rivals breaking two vertebrae at the daunting Eau Rogue corner.

Roberto Merhi and Australian Daniel Riccardo were the winners in the two races.

The penultimate round of the championship will be held this coming weekend at Magny Cours in France.

ASH ON HIS WEEKEND:
“I’m really disappointed with that,” he said. “It wasn’t a very good weekend at all. It was shocking. “I had a big shunt on Friday. I was in sixth gear in the wet looking to pass a car in front of me. I’d gone through the corner flat out before, but I touched the painted white line on the track and spun. I did a lot of damage to the car. “The Hitech team turned the car around and got it back out there, which was a good effort.”

ASH ON RACE 2:
“I thought they should have called it off – I was actually looking for the red flags. “One of the cars went in so hard at Eau Rogue. It was a very big accident. “Only two times in the race was I flat out. At that track in the dry, you are flat out most of the time! It was really, really dangerous.

ASH ON SPA FRANCORCHAMPS:
“It’s not good to do any track in the rain. “Race 1 was in the dry and its quite was good, quite fast track. I didn’t really get quite as good a feeling from it because of the rain but I’m sure I’ll be back in the future.”

The news blog

If you are a driver, a team or a series who wish to have your racing related press releases published send them to press@driverdb.com and it will be added, time permitting.

For drivers who wants to guarantee that their press release get published (as well as on the top of the front page on the main site and posted in our Facebook and Twitter feeds) you need to have a Premier Profile at Driver Database.